The 2nd Annual 4th Grade Film Festival (Part 4: Humor)

There were several genres in advertising that this year's class identified, but when it came down to writing scripts, the following are what most students chose:

Metaphor
Famous People
Extreme Action
Humor
Make Your Life Better

I'll be featuring the humor genre for this post. The point of using humor in a commercial is to associate fun, laughter, and happiness with a product. But writing a humorous script is hard. What seems funny on paper doesn't always translate to film, and sometimes what doesn't seem funny on paper translates to comedy gold. There were three examples of this genre this year.

The first commercial was very much of a collaborative effort from the class. The author had an idea of what he wanted; someone had origami and everyone was chasing him to get it. It reminded me of this guy...

I asked the kids to come up with scenarios for this script, and they created about ten. Several of the scenarios weren't doable, but they were all great. 

The author of the next commercial was one of the only students in the class this year to set out and write a pure comedy. The technical challenge for this commercial is that it called for a green screen for the ground, instead of for the background in order to simulate a hole. This was the last commercial that we filmed then, since we took the green screen down and put it outside on the ground on a very windy day. You can catch glimpses of it in some of the close-ups. I don't have a tripod, so the camera is not as steady as it needed to be. 

The author of this last featured commercial wanted to write a commercial in the genre of "Extreme Action." However she also wanted the background in the final scene to be programmed in Scratch, with a cartoon helicopter coming in with a cartoon pilot. To me this switched the genre. I took the music from Super Mario Bros. 2 and some sound effects from Pacman to compliment the Scratch programming.

The 2nd Annual 4th Grade Film Festival (Part 3: Extreme Action)

There were several genres in advertising that this year's class identified, but when it came down to writing scripts, the following are what most students chose:

Metaphor
Famous People
Extreme Action
Humor
Make Your Life Better

For this post, I'll be focusing on "Extreme Action." This is the genre, the children discovered, that tries to make a product more interesting by surrounding it with action. The Mountain Dew "Do The Dew" campaign has always been a good example of this. There are a couple of constants I've seen through the years with this genre. First, it is always the most popular genre to write in. Second, there is always a lot of running  and people looking at maps. I'll feature some of the ones that provided technical challenges.

For this first commercial, there were two big challenges; The first was to have the floor be part of the green screen. We used green pillows to get over this obstacle, and I was able to crop so of the floor in iMovie '11. The second challenge was climbing up the mountain. Again we used the green pillows to provide the ground, and tilted the camera 45 degrees to make it look like they were climbing. 

The scenery shots were taken from the "Planet Earth" TV series.

In this commercial, the author is selling mini-comics that he's written, in the vein of Lunch Money, by Andrew Clements. There is a lot of running and chasing in this one but the nice thing is that iMovie 'll has a "comic book" template that puts each scene in it's own comic panel.

The next is another epic commercial with a lot of running. To switch things up, we decided to run towards the camera instead of making a side-scroller. We filmed this commercial during "Pajama Day" at our school, so we changed the script slightly from the original.

The final commercial I'm featuring wouldn't have been possible a year ago... at least with my limited technical skill. That is because it has the actresses interacting with natural elements. In the original script the author wanted the actresses to be running away from a rolling bolder, ala Indiana Jones. I took a look at the boulder footage from the movie, but the camera was steady while the boulder was rolling and not moving with the boulder. That would make running away impossible if we used that footage.But thanks to the "Action Movie" app for the ipad, there was a solution. I had a lot of fun exploring this app on my own when I discovered it during Christmas Break making various mixed genre trailers.
Instead of a rolling boulder, we used a dropping boulder from the app. And it even had a lightning effect, which made that scene possible as well.

The 2nd Annual 4th Grade Film Festival (Part 2: Famous People)

There were several genres in advertising that this year's class identified, but when it came down to writing scripts, the following are what most students chose:
Metaphor
Famous People
Extreme Action
Humor
Make Your Life Better

The "Famous People" genre of advertising convinces you to buy a product simply because someone you recognize is selling it. This year we had two "Taylor Swift" commercials, and a "Selena Gomez" commercial. The challenge of course is that the children have to act as the famous people they want in their commercial. Another challenge is setting up the character in the script so that the audience knows who the child is playing.
The author of this commercial decided to do two things; have people filtering in at a concert before it began, and to include a shot of the star's dressing room door. I added one more thing; a fake billboard at the beginning of the commercial featuring the student that was playing Taylor Swift.
There was an additional challenge with this particular commercial. The author wanted to rewrite the lyrics to "Love Story" to fit her advertisement. She eventually decided that she would sing the part, but didn't want to play Taylor Swift. We recorded her voice, and I ran it through a few UJAM filters. Then I synched her voice with the music using Garage Band.

The 2nd Annual 4th Grade Film Festival (Part 1: Metaphors)

I still have a couple of chapters to write about our year-long class economy, but since I showcased our class commercials this past Friday, I thought I'd feature what this year's class did in the next couple of posts.
There were several genres in advertising that this year's class identified, but when it came down to writing scripts, the following are what most students chose:
Metaphor
Famous People
Extreme Action
Humor
Make Your Life Better

I'll feature each in turn in the coming posts. For this post I'll start with metaphor. Two children decided to write a commercial script with "metaphor" as their main focus. The first commercial tries to tie in the following: hand made scarfs are as warm as a fire place, and book marks protect your books like a security guard.

The second commercial sells cardboard model buildings. The author wanted to show that these buildings are durable, and just like a lock, are hard to break.


We use a green screen for the backgrounds. There were a couple of interesting challenges this year, and I'll address them in turn.